After cooling, the tuna was sent to 60-foot cleaning tables, where women removed bones and skin and separated out the white meat. The tuna then was conveyed on large wood trays to the packing tables, where more women placed the meat by hand into cans.

Machinery then dropped measured quantities of salt and oil in the cans as they moved along a conveyor to the lidding machines.

Once sealed, the cans were steam-cooked, cooled and readied for shipment.

Katie Asaro cleaned fish and packed cans for the Westgate cannery.

“When I started in to learn how to pack, we were paid by the hour,” Asaro said. “Then we were on piecework. The faster we packed, the more trays we packed, the more money we made.”

Westgate paid its fish cleaners 30 cents for each tray.

It was repetitive, assembly-line labor. But the jobs were sought after, particularly during the Depression. The workers were always on call, ready to run to the canneries whenever the tuna boats arrived at the wharves.

“Sometimes there would be two, three or four boats at the same time,” Asaro remembered. “The cannery would be flooded with fish and it had to be packed.”

Although San Diego canneries and fishing boats dominated tuna production for most of the 1900s, profits and prospects were always cyclical.

As early as 1933, worrisome competition from Japan led the San Diego Sun to run a news story with the headline: “Tuna – A Doomed Local Industry.”

But local expertise beat back the competitors in the 1930s and continued to do so for decades.

When foreign competition threatened in the 1950s, the fishermen ended the tradition of hook-and-line fishing and converted their boats to seiners that used large nylon nets to corral schools of tuna.

The efficiency of the seiners restored prosperity, but it courted controversy. Netting schools of tuna killed dolphins and sharks caught in the nets.

In June 1982, Bumble Bee Seafoods closed its plant at the foot of Crosby Street, where San Diego women had canned tuna for 70 years. The Van Kamp Seafood cannery – San Diego's last tuna cannery – followed two years later.